Is Visual Visitor Worth Signing Up For?

Visual Visitor The Buyers Journey

In marketing, we strive to help our sales staff enter the “Buyer’s Journey” as early as possible. As many of you already know, the “Buyer’s Journey” has changed over the last few years. Today most of the journey is complete by the time a potential customer places a call, fills out a form or emails your sales staff. This means the buyer has already formulated their problem, researched potential solutions and is typically reaching out to your sales staff for pricing information. Any great sales person will tell you, it is best to lead your prospect through the buying processes as opposed to blindly competing on price. This is where Visual Visitor has helped us and our clients.

Visual Visitor in a Nutshell

Visual Visitor is an anonymous website visitor identification and lead generation tool that once installed on your website, will track those potential customers visiting. This is a lot like having “Caller-ID” for your website. Do you remember the days before “Caller-ID”? You had no idea who was calling until you answered the phone. Visual Visitor is just doing the same thing for your website.

So now as the potential customers are visiting our site, our sales staff receive instant email notifications about the company, contacts and their interests identified by the pages they have viewed. This notification comes packed with actionable information such as links to resources about this company and their social profiles. Now our sales staff has all the information they need to research and reach out to the potential new customer within minutes of them browsing our site. This enables us the ability to enter they buyer’s journey earlier in the process. We can then help the customer define their issue, assist in providing creative approaches, but most importantly, we can start building a relationship.

All of this data is then displayed and is easily accessible to our team via an intuitive dashboard. This allows us to filter companies, manage our notification settings, set our individual territories and so much more.

Visual Visitor Integration

Like any lead generation system we like to have options to integrate the data produced with other systems, such as a CRM, Email Campaign Management, Slack and anything else we can think of. While Visual Visitor offers native integration for a handful of CRM systems, what we really liked was that they have integrated with Zapier. For those of you who are not familiar with Zapier, it is an integration platform for mere mortals. It allows an average user to connect over 750 applications without any programming. With this integration, we tested connecting Visual Visitor with Zoho CRM and MailChimp. Both worked flawlessly.

There are some other integrations points to note on Visual Visitor. The system has the ability to seamlessly integrate with your existing website forms and email campaign system. For the existing website forms, we tested it using “Gravity Forms” for WordPress. Once we setup the form mapping within the system, anytime someone filled out a form, Visual Visitor would tag the potential customer. So if they filled out a form to download one of our whitepapers, we would always know this exact individual was back on our site. It was a similar process for setting up the email campaign integration. We simply created the email campaign entry with Visual Visitor and used their link builder for MailChimp to create our links for our email campaign. When any of the recipients clicked on the link, they were tagged. We found both of these features extremely valuable for identifying potential customers that dropped off the planet but then showed back up six months later looking at our site again.

Interesting New Features of Visual Visitor

We have had the opportunity of being a beta tester for a new feature Visual Visitor is releasing and we are quite impressed. As you know every sales person loves to know when someone reads their email. So Visual Visitor has added individual email tracking to an already excellent product. Since we use Gmail, we used their Chrome Plugin that seamlessly integrates into our gmail client. The Visual Visitor plugin allowed us to “Tag” messages that we wanted tracked, gave us the ability to use email templates for process streamlining and automatically tagged any links included in the email to our site. So whenever a recipient clicked a link in the email, they would become a tagged visitor and we would see the email address of the visitor every time they returned to the site. As for notifications from the email client, you receive both an instant pop-up window with information about your email notifications as well as an email notification with more detail on the location of the user reading the email, how many times they have read it, how long it took them to read it after you sent it to them.

VisualVisitor also has all of this data rolled up into nice dashboards so you can begin to understand how many of your emails are opened, how long it took for users to open them, what are your most opened email and much more. Now to be fair, this system is not perfect. We did find that when sending to Gmail users, the location information always shows as a Google datacenter. We have confirmed with support that this is due to caching performed by Google and can’t be prevented at this time. However, we found most other email systems identified the accurate location of the user. While we are using Gmail, I am told that they have an add-in for Outlook for companies that are using other mail systems.

Our team has thoroughly enjoyed testing this new feature and at this point we have come to rely heavily on it for our daily sales process. We have also found it to be useful for other functions within the company, such as account receivable.

What was the Sales Process like?

We signed up for a 2 week no obligation free trial and it was just that. Visual Visitor did not require a credit card and there was no automatic conversion or billing. After signing up for the free trial, we instantly received our account credentials and tracking code information. We opted to us the Visual Visitor WordPress plugin to install on our site. This process took under 5 minutes to complete, much like any other plugin. After the installation, we received a call from our account representative at Visual Visitor who took the time to listen about our business and our current sales process. He then scheduled a call for us and our sales staff to demo the service and opened a dialog on how he felt it would fit best in our process. The demo was great and lasted about 45 minutes with questions. At the end of our trial we received a notification that our trial had ended and instructions on how to convert to a paid account if we wanted to continue the service. When we decided to move forward with the service, it took only seconds to login and enter the billing information. Once that was complete, the service continued to function and we didn’t have to reinstall the tracking code or plugin. It just worked and it was easy.

Is Visual Visitor Worth Signing Up For?

For us, it is a resounding “YES”. Visual Visitor has become an invaluable part of our sales process as well as for many of our clients. I can’t think of another tool that provides this much value for their price point. But one last thing to remember, Visual Visitor will identify the potential customers, but it is up to you to reach out and start the relationship.